Congratulations, you have decided to get in touch with your wild side!

Fury is the dual wielding warrior dps spec. You will become a whirlwinding, plate clad, steel flashing, dual 2 hander wielding, cuisinart of doom. You will also die in PvE more than you ever died before. And like any new spec, it takes time and gear to get to the point where you can own the damage meters. It’s a very fun spec to play but Fury, due to scaling issues, only really takes off after you get a minimal level of gear.

How to Spec

This is the standard raiding Fury spec. It has changed a bit with 3.1 in that the talent that gives expertise has swapped with Improved Intercept. Imp Intercept is more of a PvP talent so I’ve taken Imp Execute here instead. You will note that you have no talent that lets you drop threat.

You have a bit of leeway with some of the points (and one of the fury warriors I raid with swears by Heroic Fury) but these are the key talents:

Precision — you NEED a minimal amount of hit to make this build work. Precision will help a lot.

Bloodthirst and Improved Whirlwind — Your two main attacks as a Fury warrior. Note that Bloodthirst is one of the few dps talents that isn’t dependent on your weapon damage. Instead it depends on your total attack power.

Flurry — You will be aiming to keep Flurry up at all times. This is why Fury guides point you to aiming for a minimum amount of crit on your gear.

Bloodsurge — The only interesting thing to happen to Fury in Wrath, this lets you weave in some instant Slams with the rest of your rotation.

Rampage — If you know you will always have a Feral druid with you, this isn’t critical. However, it is one of the few raid utility buffs that Fury warriors get.

Titan’s Grip — The damage has been reduced a notch in 3.1 but this is still what Fury warriors are all about in Wrath.

Impale/ Deep Wounds/ 2-Handed Weapon Spec — These are why you sink some points into Arms. Every single one of them is a dps multiplier that plays to your strengths.

The cleave glyph is very good and will give some impressive dps when there is more than one mob involved. Painful experience shows that Fury warriors who glyph for cleave tend to get aggro and die a lot. It’s good, but use with caution.

How to dps

The regular Fury rotation goes:

Bloodthirst -> Whirlwind -> spare cooldown -> spare cooldown

Try to never miss a Bloodthirst or Whirlwind. You can use the spare cooldowns to refresh shouts, apply instant Slams if Bloodsurge procs, apply Sunder if there isn’t a Protection Warrior around, Heroic Strike if you have a lot of spare rage (or Cleave if there is more than one mob), or pick your nose.

Once the mob is below 20% health, you can start to Execute. Ideally you would retain the standard rotation and execute during spare cooldowns but since execute drains your rage, this is only possible in pretty high rage situations. If low on rage and glyphed for it, just spam execute instead.

Don’t forget to use Victory Rush when shifting from one mob to the next in a multi-mob pull.

164 hit. You need this to never miss with ‘yellow’ attacks on raid bosses, assuming that you have maxed out Precision. Until you have 164 hit, this is your first priority. After 164 hit, it becomes pretty much your last priority.

Strength/ Attack Power — In 3.1, Strength becomes your best scaling stat. You will want to stack it as high as it can go. Aim for 2500 Attack Power as a starting point, there is no end point.

Crit — Crit is another stat that you can stack as high as you want, coupled with Deep Wounds and Impale it will always increase your damage. But also, because of Flurry, when you crit your attack speed increases by 30%. This means more ‘white’ damage and, just as important, more rage (from the damage that you do). At higher gear levels rage won’t be such as issue but when starting out, aim for crit of 24/25% because you’ll need a minimum amount of rage to be able to stick with your best rotation. In practice, a lot of Strength dps gear also has Crit on it.

Expertise — Ideally you’d like to have 26 expertise (214 rating) so that bosses can no longer dodge your attacks.

Armour Penetration — Improving in 3.1. Like Strength, this stat always improves with stacking. There is no upper limit. After you get to about 120-130 it becomes better than crit (I have this on authority from our fury warriors but no link to prove that).

Haste — Doesn’t hurt to have some haste on your gear but it’s never a priority.

Gear Lists

I don’t know many good gear lists for Fury Warriors, and the ones that do exist will be updated shortly for 3.1/ Ulduar. This link is to Corbusier’s guide on tankspot, which doesn’t value Strength as highly as it will be in 3.1 but otherwise is a good place to start.

Do note that the Cloak of Bloodied Waters (a random BoE drop in heroic Gundrak) is very very solid for Fury. You may be able to find one on the Auction House.

Good starting weapons are the 2 handed sword you can get with Ebon Blade rep, and the crafted 2 handed mace. Other crafted gear to check out are the Spiked Titansteel Helm, and Vengeance Bracers.

Where addons can really help is in spotting the instant slam procs from Bloodsurge. I tweaked Parrot (my scrolling combat text) to flash up some text when it goes off. Guys in my guild swear by Power Auras.

Either of these takes a little setting up but will help immensely. This is a link to a thread on tankspot where people discuss other addons they use to do the same thing.

You will also learn to love the threat meter.

More resources for Fury

Compared to the plethora of tanking resources, Fury is a bit thin on the ground.

Fury has always been my ‘non prot’ spec, and just for the hell of it, i’ve been playing with the arms talent calcs. Less crap to deal with ‘dual wield’, battle stance now has passive armor penetration…

In other news, spinksville is my go to bookmark on the PSP when I don’t have my ‘puter powered up, or am just looking for a quick fix while something warms up.

Yeah, it used to need a lot more hit but they reduced it. So really, it’s not so bad to gear up for now. I’d go through and replace those +hit gems, strength or crit will be better bang for your buck these days.

OK, good point. There is no magic number for crit and I was being a bit lazy and going off what was recommended to me by a friend. I will update to note this when I have a mo.

Crit is generally a good scaling stat for fury (although not scaling as well as strength now) but the big thing about flurry at low gear levels is that a) it increases your incoming rage which means managing the rotation better, more heroic strikes, faster executes etc and b) once you can reliably keep flurry up consistently, adding more crit is still good but doesn’t have quite such a big effect on rage.

In practice, most strength gear will have crit also so it won’t be such a big deal but I still think it’s worth noting that a bare minimum (whatever it may be) is important.

Great guide. I take it because you recommend speccing Whirlwind that most people play Fury in Berserker Stance? I don’t raid but I like PvEing with my Fury Warrior in Battle Stance so I can use Charge, Rend and Overpower. I wonder if that will become more popular when Cataclysm comes out as people will be able to spec a bit deeper into Arms after maxing Fury.

Fury does work best when you play it in Berserker Stance and use Bloodthirst/Whirlwind as your main attacks. Ignore Rend and Overpower in a Fury build (by all means try an Arms build if you enjoy that style of play though). You should have improved berserker stance, which is the talent that makes Fury benefit so crazy well from strength on gear … but only while you are in Berserker Stance.

Stance shifting just means you lose rage and overpower generally isn’t worth it unless you are running with improved overpower from Arms. As far as charge is concerned, yes you lose that in Fury in return for easy access to Intercept. (Again, an Arms build can take Juggernaut which lets you charge in battle).

I will be interested to see how getting a few extra points from Cataclysm changes things up. I suspect that what would actually happen for Fury is that Fury warriors will happily grab Axe or Sword spec and just keep going as they had been before.